Steve Smith has written an opinion piece for MediaPost about why mobile content and services are not as successful in the US as elsewhere. He discards media saturation and the car culture as possible reasons, and also the arguments that the networks aren’t technologically advanced enough. He argues that mobile content is just not convenient… “drilling for applications and WAP favorites, passing photos to one another and downloading music is just on the other side of the tipping point of convenience. The content is not that good to induce us to learn new habits — and the alternative, easier channels to the same information are just not that far away…I think that mobile content would do well to get over itself. Let’s face it; having in-hand my headlines, email, games, MySpace, etc. just is not that important. Mobile data is convenient, which is different from important. Important is connecting with family and friends, which is why we learned to navigate phone interfaces to begin with, and why low-tech SMS is the mobile cash cow that mobile TV can only dream of becoming”.
It’s the usability bugbear, and I suspect there’s a lot of people who would agree with him. People have been pointing out the sheer inaccessibility of mobile content for years, but Smith puts it pretty clearly — and from a consumer viewpoint rather than a content vendor viewpoint.
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